The bilingual archive of Papas, pagarch in the years 660-670’s, has been found in 1922 in a jar in Edfu and transferred in the French Institute in Cairo. Roger Rémondon published a hundred of Greek documents in 1953 but the Coptic side was left mostly unstudied. Since 2016, a dozen of scholars have meet regularly to work on this archive as part of a project first entitled "Edfou trente ans après la conquête arabe". Since 1 January 2019, "Edfou au VIIe siècle" (Edfu in the 7th century) is an IFAO program co-directed by Anne Boudhors and Alain Delattre with which D-scribes is in close collaboration. Most of the papyri were broken into small pieces and the challenge addressed by this case study inside D-scribes project is to classify and reunite them.

D-scribes organized the International Conference "Treasures from the Jar: Reconstructing the early stages of Islamic rule in Egypt thanks to the papyrus archive of Papas (Edfu)" in Basel University, 2-4 November 2021. See more here.

Bibliography 

R. Rémondon, Papyrus grecs d’Apollônos Anô, DFIFAO 19, 1953.These files are downloadable here and will soon be available in the forthcoming IFAO’s Digital Library of out of stock publications.

J. Gascou, K.A. Worp, “Problèmes de Documentation Apollinopolite”, ZPE 49, 1982, p. 83-95.

A. Boud’hors et A. Delattre, avec la collaboration de L. Berkes, R.-L. Chang, E. Garel, J. Gascou, I. Marthot, G. Ochała, N. Vanthieghem, "Un nouveau départ pour les archives de Papas", BIFAO 117, 2017, p. 87-124.

A. Boud’hors et A. Delattre, avec la collaboration de R.-L. Chang, E. Garel, J. Gascou, I. Marthot, G. Ochała, "Papyrus coptes et grecs de la jarre d’Edfou (suite)", BIFAO 118, 2018, p. 1-46.

A. Boud’hors, “Situating the Figure of Papas, Pagarch of Edfu at the End of the Seventh Century: the Contribution of the Coptic Documents” in S. R. Huebner, E. Garosi, I. Marthot-Santaniello, M. Müller, S. Schmidt and M. Stern (eds), Living the End of Antiquity – Individual Histories from Byzantine to Islamic Egypt, 2020, p. 63-72.

A. Boud’hors, J. Gascou, "Un nouveau papyrus de la jarre d'Edfou", BIFAO 120, 2020, p. 77-86.

Video from Neo-Paleography Conference

12. Identifying hands and styles in the Coptic papyri from Edfu (Papas' archive): Anne Boud’hors

Conference "Treasures from the Jar: Reconstructing the early stages of Islamic rule in Egypt thanks to the papyrus archive of Papas (Edfu)"in Basel and online, Nov. 2-4 2021 organized by d-scribes.